Playtime drawing to a close

"I'm not getting out because I hate theatre or anything, I'm getting out because I want to live."

With such a statement, it certainly sounds as if Australia's most celebrated and successful playwright, David Williamson, has decided to bring to a close a theatre career spanning almost 35 years, replete with iconic hits such as The Club and The Removalists.

However, speaking from his Noosa Heads home, Williamson was quick to clarify he wasn't retiring from major theatre work but that health problems were forcing him to slow down.

Williamson has already written a work for next year's Sydney Theatre Company season, a play that he says is "about issues fairly central to our national life, but I hope most of my plays are about that".

He says he wouldn't call it "the absolute last" play he would write for the company.

"It's up to the STC; I'm not revealing any of their business," he says. "But I'm certainly not going on indefinitely. A mainstage production every year is too stressful."

Stress is at the heart, literally, of the 62-year-old's decision. He has been diagnosed with a stress-related heart condition.

"I've been into hospital six times in the past three years," he says.

"I've had to be zapped once to get it back to a normal rhythm and it's not pleasant. I just want to stay alive a bit longer." Williamson wants to concentrate on smaller theatre works and screenplays, of which he has two in the pipeline.

"They (screenplays) aren't nearly as stressful: you can go at a slower pace," he says.

Exacerbating Williamson's stress recently were the reviews of his new play, Amigos, starring Garry McDonald, which opens at the Victorian Arts Centre tonight. Critics received it coolly in its recent Sydney season.

Over-sensitive on his own admission - "that's why I remember the bad reviews" - Williamson has long been easily riled by critics. "It's irritating to have three people in a city of 4 million tell you that you can't write," he says.

"I'm a sensitive person and that's probably why I'm a writer... if I'd been totally thick-skinned the plays would be very dull."

He considers Amigos to be one of the best plays he's written. "I don't think there's been a hatchet job like it on Australian mateship and that might have offended a few people. Well, so be it."

Although he is one of the biggest drawcards for the STC and the Melbourne Theatre Company, Williamson denies they would miss his box-office pull.

"I do well for the companies. They could survive without me and soon they will survive without me. I've helped fill theatres for the past 35 years and it's been an ultimate buzz," he says.

MTC artistic director Simon Phillips says it is "unthinkable" that new Williamson plays will dry up.

"But by the same token he's earned the right to slow down, if that's his choice," says Phillips.

"He's been churning out a play a year, sometimes two, for so long that I think it's appropriate he takes a bit of a breather, with his health... we'd rather lose him temporarily than permanently."